Scientists Confirms the Orcas Kill the blue Whale For the First Time
Killer whales don't hesitate to hunt from herring to great white sharks. For the first time, gory footage reveals that orca pods can even bring down an adult blue whale. While past reports reveal that they were attempted attacks on blue whales, no one has observed orcas complete the job until March 19th, 2019. The series of events has been taken off on the southwestern coast of Australia from 2019 to 2021. The three separate attacks were described in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This is the biggest predation event on the planet,” says study coauthor Robert Pitman, a cetacean ecologist to Science News’s Anna Gibbs. “We haven’t seen things like this since dinosaurs were here, and probably not even then.” In each attack, the orcas—also called killer whales—relied on strength in numbers. Between 50 and 75 orcas took part in each hunt, and more than a dozen of the same individuals were involved in all three events. The orcas employed different tactics to take down the whales, inc...